As a Cuban that is currently living in Cuba, I think it might be useful to voice my opinions, as I have read some comments here which I consider less than accurate in some respects. To avoid typing too much, I'll summarize with... bullet points?
* The published figure of 10 million people is already outdated. First, they are official figures, which means that they are not telling the truth. Second, six months have elapsed; which means the actual number of residents is less than 9 million.
* Not only a large amount of people are gone, but most of them are young, productive people; lots of them professionals in several critical aspects of a functioning society. Where I work I'm only one of the few that remains in my activity (IT & IT adjacent).
* Also gone are many of the more... reactive? brave? People that voiced discontent with the government and just chose to leave. What remains are relatively elderly people that are very conformist, or simple are not brave enough to voice their concerns.
* Is Cuba a dictatorship? No.
* Is Cuba a totalitarian state? Absolutely. The Cuban Communist Party is the only one allowed, as is written in the (relatively recent) Constitution. Even more than that, it exists above the Constitution, so this texts has no value at all.
* Are there human rights violations in Cuba? Yes, no doubt.
* Does the US embargo negatively impacts Cuba? Absolutely. Every single day, for the common people, that is. The elites? The top dogs of the Party? Of course they are unaffected; they are your run of the mill corrupt people in power, and they can have anything.
* Can Cuba trade with other countries? In theory, yes... in practice, it is very difficult. In addition, Cuba is a minuscule market that interests no one. China, for instance, has very little presence in Cuba, despite we being "allies". But they don't care.
I don't know how this could unfold in the future, except with a total collapse. I really wish the end of the embargo, and the possibility of open an free elections. We, common people, are at the mercy of US politics and being managed by inmensely incompetent leaders. We could debate all week on who's at fault here, who threw the first stone, but, as of this moment, that would be sterile. This country will be gone.
Argentino here. I think Venezuela is going through the same issues. We had A LOT of Venezuelan immigrants in Arg and Chile and they said the same thing you're saying: that people leaving were the "brave, smart, willing to work people" and the ones remaining were the scum.
Can I ask you what are the reasons you decide to stay?
Im in a similar situation than GP. Leaving can be expensive and dangerous, more so if one does not have support on the other side. I have people that directly depend on me (little kids, elderly parents) and not just financially. Some people may say "you can help them better when you are out, send remittances, get them out too" but its just complicated.
I do have the opportunity to leave, yes. But, on the one hand, there's immediate family that depends on me (and not just economically.) On the other hand, I'm approaching an age which I feel does not makes me very hireable, so to speak, despite my 30+ years of experience in the field.
Yes, the situation is dire; and I'll be here to witness how this unfolds :|
In the past, when Fidel Castro was alive and in full posession of his faculties, you could easily say that he was a dictator. Everything of importance was designed, implemented, and micro managed by him. The man was a megalomaniac and, and history would show, also incompetent; but boy, the cult of personality goes deep here, not only in mass media but many of the sicophants.
Today the Secretary General has no power. Everybody knows that; along with the fact that he is also a puppet with the charisma of bucket half filled with sand. Guidance and executive power come first from the Central Committee; which I'm sure follows "tips" and "recommendations" from Raúl Castro (Fidel's brother), a man that should be effectively retired. Everybody knows that's not the case.
However, and being honest, I really don't care about labeling this place as a dictatorship or not (it is a fuzzy concept for me, and I won't fight hard for one or the other). Unless there's a clear definition, labels are sometimes subjective. Hell, this is not even a communist country, despite what they themselves like to present; this is not the dictatorship of the proletariat. And never was.
When I was there the painted picture I was taught was different than what I saw.
I am not a dictator in my house. No one would say that either. They would say I do make the rules and have final authority. Can I determine our living conditions? Yes. I try to run a good house and love those under my care. We are communists in practice. Not by name.
> Hardliners have grown worried that the experiment with capitalism could threaten the government’s tight grip on power, and the Cuban military, which used to control most foreign currency coming into the island, is viewing these companies as competition, sources in Cuba said.
How much blame does the military have for the mass exodus of Cubans?
The military is where all the real power is concentrated, and not because of being military per se. They have no might whatsoever in relation to other countries... they probably have two working jets from the 1970s, four boats with rotting hulls, eleven pistols, and eight rifles. However, they do have a shadow and parallel economic system that exists beyond public scrutiny. By design. Quoting the Treasury Department: Grupo de Administración Empresarial S.A. (GAESA) is a Cuban military-controlled umbrella enterprise with interests in the tourism, financial investment, import/export, and remittance sectors of Cuba’s economy. GAESA’s portfolio includes businesses incorporated in Panama to bypass CACR-related restrictions.
Those people can, and do, summon whatever resources they need to do whatever they want. In particular, the idea that Cuba should be a tourist destination has made them build hotels left and right, bleeding other services dry. And by services, I mean, everything else. That's why everything is in decay, collapsing, and why people choose to leave (one of the reasons, of course).
Ah! This could have been great for me, except that Tailscale recently cut off access to Cuban nationals to their service (they have their reasons, I guess.) Still, I think that the service they're building, step by step, is fine actually.
While I don’t work for Tailscale and don’t know their specific reasons, I do know that US export controls and sanctions with respect to Cuba are quite complicated and are designed more due to historical & continuing political pressures than sensible policy.
I used to be involved in leading a US charitable nonprofit that, during the Obama years, once wanted to pay for someone to attend a technical conference in Cuba (or maybe it was to pay for a Cuban to attend a technical conference elsewhere - I forget). We did actually make it happen, but it involved consulting with lawyers, comparing the details of the situation against the applicable rules, and getting people to promise to stay within those rules.
My guess is that either Tailscale or one of the providers they depend on is cutting off Cubans as an attempt to comply with these Cuba-specific US legal obligations, or at least to reduce their risk of falling into non-compliance.
At the very least, GitHub has found ways to legally make most (not all) of their offerings available to Cubans / in Cuba despite the sanctions, except for more narrowly banned individuals and groups. So if you can obtain the open source code for Tailscale (client) and Headscale (server), you can at least use that to benefit from Tailscale’s software.
I believe Tailscale re-incorporated from a Canadian company into a US company for various compliance things being easier, but a consequence is that now they have to follow certain US obligations WRT Cuba, amongst others.
Dear US government, please open VPN access to everyone in the world. If you want citizens of an authoritative nation to be able to escape their local firewall, then these systems need to be available. You have a history of making these products and even funding them through things like Radio Free Asia. Though for some reason you also attack these systems too and cut their legs off. Get your fucking act together. Both citizens of our own country need encryption to avoid spying on from foreign nations as well as citizens of authoritarian nations need encryption to avoid spying from their own governments. They'll never rise up against their governments if they can't secretly communicate. Preventing encryption in our own country means you fear this too, which is not a great thing to tell your citizens.
America's Cuba policy is a failure and continues to be a failure. Do you not think if America opened up to Cuba that wouldn't over time drastically lesson their dependency on Russia?
Cuba really doesn't have much of a choice, they have to trade with "friendly" nations of which America refuses to be.
Fun fact, when we (Canadians) go to Cuba they typically won't stamp our passports because they know it causes us issues when trying to enter the US.
You would think we'd want the contrapositive: to enrich them with global influx of capitalist market consumer demand, enough that they gain an independently self-stable economy, and stop feeling the need to rely on the support of Russia and China so much.
(Or, at least, offer subsidies to their government if they stop supporting Russian and Chinese spies with their numbers stations et al.)
This is a very naive way to look at the world. Even if theoretically they would be happy with such "self-stable economy" [they naturally won't—nothing prevents human desires to ask for more and try to build win-win friendships,] Russia and China are not sitting around; they would go and meddle with their affairs.
Mind you, I am not saying there is an existential possibility of a better policy, but the calculus would be nowhere as trivial as this.
> Russia and China are not sitting around; they would go and meddle with their affairs.
I mean, certainly, but it's like having a club on your car's steering wheel: it's not about creating perfect protection, it's about ensuring your car isn't the softest target for theft in the parking lot.
If Cuba had fewer reasons to talk to Russia and China, then Russia and China would have fewer reasons to talk to Cuba in particular, vs. other Caribbean and Central American nations. Which would, potentially, spread their resources thinner and decrease covert-ops ROI, as they'd be having to engage with several nations who only weakly want them there, instead of one nation that desperately wants them there.
(And yes, I do realize that these powers do already engage with other nations in the area, e.g. Nicaragua. But not in the same way / not for the same reasons.)
Given how badly that idea failed with China, I don’t see it happening any time soon with Cuba, a mere 90 miles from the US mainland. That proximity is a main reason why Cuba gets such special attention.
I mean, China has all the base resources to be a superpower — and has been a continent-spanning, colonizing empire many times in its past — so it's unclear what the US was expecting to happen there. (Probably something to do with short-term realpolitik "rock and a hard place" leverage.) Cuba has never and will never be a threat to the US, except insofar as they provide projection of strength for some other ally. A Cuba that sees itself as a sovereign nation would be a good thing, in the same way that ex-USSR satellites that see themselves as sovereign nations are a good thing.
Also, if you want to talk about countries that the US actually gives "special attention" to, I'd more compare/contrast to the relationship between the US and Panama.
> in the same way that ex-USSR satellites that see themselves as sovereign nations are a good thing.
Cuba would have do what those other ex-USSR satellites did and discard communism and authoritarianism in favor of democracy. Then, yes, seeing themselves as a sovereign state would be a good thing.
It doesn't even have to discard the communism. Look it Vietnam: we fought a war against them in living memory, and we invite their people to go through our military training schools now so they can see how we do things.
Yeah that's an interesting comparison, though it's mainly b/c Vietnam sees China as its main adversary and threat, along with an opportunity to steal parts of the Asian manufacturing supply chain from China. The shared enemy and shared economic interests b/t US and Vietnam are pretty strongly aligned.
But I'm not sure if such an alignment could be created between the US and Cuba while Cuba remains a communist authoritarian hereditary dictatorship, since there's no shared enemy nearby and no strong shared economic incentive. Seems like the only real alignment would be Cuba becoming a democracy.
Exactly. I do believe that certain individuals and organizations might/should be excluded from service here; however, it seems like the only technical solution to regulations enforcement is to wholesale block a whole country.
The NK state is more than capable of arranging their own VPNs.
I think the West gains a lot more by having generally available VPN access in adversary states than it loses from their ability to purchase technical services that they still will have difficulty getting access to currency to pay for and they still will have difficulty actually shipping anything to NK.
Yes? Making it easier for North Korean citizens, or even just leadership, to communicate privately with each other and with people outside makes it easier for them to negotiate or even defect, and would help de-escalation efforts.
> What might the reasons be on the "no" side?
I guess one could argue that the North Korean government doesn't have access to secure VPN systems for government use (pretty implausible IMO) and that increasing their costs is inherently worth it? Realistically most of the opposition would come from those who benefit from the status quo (e.g. arms suppliers) and don't want to see that de-escalation, and I guess the extremely risk averse who would rather keep kicking the can indefinitely and hoping the blowup doesn't come until after they're dead, than risk actually trying to help North Korea's people.
The vast majority of north koreans only have access to the nationwide intranet. Those that do have outside connection are few trusted elites who are there to do business. And no matter who you are (this also applies to foreigners in the country), your device and connection is heavily monitored by the state. Merely posessing a non-state sanctioned device as a north korean is considered a serious criminal offense. At that point the only use case of a VPN for someone with a north korean IP is for cybercrime and not dissidents.
Bad comparison. NK is a nuclear state with nuclear weapons that is constantly threatening its neighbors. Cuba flirted with the idea but they didn't really materialize any nuclear or military capabilities. This was also a long time ago.
It is not fake. At the same time, I find it fishy as hell. First of all, it was not uncovered by the authorities, but by others; since it went public, then the authorities made the statemente yesterday evening (Cuba time.) It could be that an investigation was under way and this just blew the lid off.
Still, here's what I find extremely strange: Cuba is an island with very tight border controls; they know exactly who leaves and who enters. And here we have some kids going through the military service, that can fly out of Cuba? By the hundreds? No way.
The kids said that they were going to Russia to participate in construction activities, as contracted workers; however, they were diverted elsewhere with the ultimate destination being the front lines in the future. Could they be lying? Of course. I don't know.
Yup. As a Cuban, sometimes it is annoying and sometimes go beyond that. Some cloud providers are totally off limits for us, some are fine with us (the minority and less known), some let us use some services but no others, some even have valid OFAC licenses but still deny access (because ACL complexities, I suppose)... it's all over the place. That's why I'm 95% of the time on crappy VPNs both to escape/evade US sanctions and my own country censoring mechanisms.
The thing is, I somewhat understand why the sanctions were placed decades ago, but... is that rationale still valid? Anyway, and sadly, the sanctions affect "regular" people like me the most. The ruling elite? Not at all.
Funny how everyone talks about the Chinese "great firewall" that blocks access towards some western platforms from China, and no one talks about "USA great firewall" that blocks Cuban citizen from acceding to a lot of services
Besides the technical differences brought up by other commenters, I'm a Canadian and I hear about USA sanctions toward Cuba on regular TV news and newspapers, never mind more specific news sources, every USA election cycle. It's a massive topic of public debate, and from what I can see it hugely influences outcomes of key seats in state and federal elections. Sometimes these claims of "nobody talks" or "mainstream media doesn't want you to know" are just... incorrect?
Because the latter is not a thing. The United States does not implement any border firewalls on traffic entering the country. No law compels blocking Cuban citizens from accessing US hosted content, just preventing them from entering into financial transactions.
I honestly have no idea how the sanctions are reflected in the actual wording of the law, but what I see is that many companies are actually overzealous and wholesale limit (block) access regardless of the outcome of the content request (that is, even if the transaction is not a financial one.)
Let me give you an example: I can't open dell.com, at all. What I want to believe is that they blocked all access because it was easy, just a geo thingy flipped on. It is their decision though, but it is supported on existing sanctions. So... yes, the law compels them to do it, indirectly or not. And there are hundreds, thousands of other examples that I can provide, if you're interested.
> Anyway, and sadly, the sanctions affect "regular" people like me the most. The ruling elite? Not at all.
This confirms my secondhand knowledge of financial sanctions. It seems to universally be this way and makes me wonder why we still tout them as if they were effective. They sure don’t seem to be.
Like, what things? I'm a citizen of a heavily sanctioned country, even though I haven't lived there for years. If anything, sanctions only affect people in such a way that they hate the countries that imposed the sanctions on their country, but not their own government. That's a very naive point of view.
Like we saw recentlly with Russia, the people were not upset when they invaded Ukraine. Then when McDonald's pulled out of Russia a fat guy chained itself to the doors. So internet, fast-food, clothes, cars, movies... water pumps... and so on.
False. There's a lot (the majority) of people from my close circle who were and are "upset", if I can put it this way. I don't have the statistics, but let's say that's 80/20 ratio (supporters/non-supporters), even though I personally believe it's closer to 50/50.
> fast-food, clothes
So you really think that limited access to the Internet and the fact that McDonalds is gone would force these 20% to get on the streets and fight against the heavily armed government forces AND the rest 80% of the country population? I mean, among the other reasons that come to mind, sanctions (movies, cars, clothes - what??) are somewhere at the very bottom of my list, if matter at all.
It's not what I think, is what actually happened: a russian guy protested ONLY for his lifestyle, a burger, not for his government killing other people.
The're definitely not. What's more, to avoid incidents like this, not only people that routinely work and service these kind of vessels are scrutinized by the authorities, but they (the vessels) are usually disabled when not in use. That applies equally to seagoing and air crafts (space, well... we still don't have those.)
That's old news. The state mandated rate is around 120 CUP per USD (with a little spread when buying/selling, and for other market fluctuations.) But almost no one uses that mechanism, as the state is profoundly insolvent.
The black market, or unofficial, rate is what everyone thinks about[2].
Because Netflix is not a Cloudflare client, so CF can't pass the source (client) IP. The same should happen with Google, Facebook (or anyone not behind CF infrastructure).
At least, that's the way I'm currently understanding it.
(Cuban here.) I find this result very interesting, really, as we're exposed to these chemicals in varying degrees and frequency. I personally live in a epidemiological controlled/safe (-ish) area of Havana, so my exposure is very limited. However, I do know that some other areas are way more affected by vectors since they are less urbanized and with more population density.
In those cases the authorities are more aggressive in the use of mass fumigation, particularly during the summer and autumn; but still I don't think that such elevated frequency produces the effects shown in the article, for the general population, that is.
It is true that we're particularly vulnerable to zika, chikungunya, yellow fever, and dengue fever (especially in 2016); and what I can easily imagine (and conjecture) is that diplomatic personnel were overly (and rightly) concerned, and liberally applied these products with more zeal than necessary. Thus, increased their exposition to these chemicals.
They were apparently spraying INSIDE the offices. I'm not particularly concerned about pesticides in general, but I would NEVER use them indoors.
Also, the diplomatic buildings are likely well sealed and air conditioned while I suspect local buildings use more natural cooling (open windows and the breeze) and are thus better ventilated.
